Country Mouse

Marmalade addicts – the Queen, Paddington and me giles wood

‘If, at some future period of the world’s history, men should acquire the art of flying, there can be no doubt that migration would become the custom, and whole nations would change their localities,’ wrote Richard Jefferies in 1883.

Seville is in my DNA through the marmalade connection and its orange season. Famous for being over almost before it has begun, the season runs from the end of December through to mid-February.

This year, the season coincided with our hot-water boiler failing at precisely the same time as our daughters’ planned return for a family-bonding week. Conditions in the cottage would be more intolerable than usual.

As if reading my mind, my technically literate elder daughter booked a six-day break at Las Casas de la Juderia in the historic centre of that well-dressed city of flamenco dancers, mysterious gentlemen in capes, black cloaks and scarlet scarves of the finest vicuna. She presented it as a fait accompli and we compliantly gathered at Gatwick.

Seville marmalade, and the snobbery associated with it, was emblematic of my parents’ incompatibility.

My father’s preference for Robertson’s Shredless was, by his own admission, plebeian. If ever compelled to eat one of my mother’s home-made Constance Spry recipes, namely Mr Ringrose’s or even Colonel Gore’s, he would ostentatiously spit out the shreds with a vehemence, as if she had been trying to poison him with baby scorpions.

What a waste of her training at Winkfield – her parents had groomed her to marry a company director. My father was a company director – of a Potteries fireplace-manufacturing firm – but he lacked that final dab of polish which would have accrued from his attending a public school, even a minor one. He never acquired the taste for bitter marmalade. He devoured Glacier Mints.

Nothing can prepare an Englishman for the sad day when his mother’s preserving pans, quaint sieves and muslin bags go to house clearance because her housing-association bungalow simply hasn’t the space for all that paraphernalia.

Now I can no longer get my hands on a home-made version, I find Oxford Cooper’s Vintage Marmalade quite acceptable. But the late Lady Rupert Nevill would not approve.

As the model for the haughty Lady Trentham in Gosford Park, played by Maggie Smith, she famously denounced those households shabby enough not to have made their own – ‘Oh! Shopbought marmalade!’

It was Alfonso XVIII and his wife, Queen Eugenia de Battenberg, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who started the tradition of sending the British Royal Family bitter oranges from the Royal Alcázar of Seville for the purpose of marmalade-making.

Fans of marmalade cannot separate a visit to Seville from a visit to this royal palace – or can they? It was no Freudian slip when my wife tried to book ‘skip-theline tickets to Alcatraz’.

Our pre-booked tickets were in reality only permission to join a snaking queue of other pre-booked ticket-holders. The prison analogy stuck.

In each crowded state room, apart from the less-visited tapestry room, my instinct was to break out. This was peak tourism and the zombies around us seemed curiously uninterested in the aesthetics. I wasn’t the first to parrot the phrase, ‘If it’s like this in February, imagine it during high season.’

No wonder Mary eventually found me staring at the contents of a skip full of windfall oranges at the darkest corner of the rather gloomy ‘English garden’.

The family was quick to diagnose the problem – low blood sugar. It was at least four hours since I had stuffed my face with breakfast and they swiftly bagged a sunny table at a café within the grounds. A very unroyal self-service affair – but one daughter obligingly queued at a counter and returned with a tray bearing a sugary cortado and an excellent craft beer from Granada, which went by the name of Alhambra, plus Ibérico ham and cheese bocadillos. My shoulders dropped a full six inches as I decompressed.

As the strong foreign ale worked its magic, I was able to claim what every visitor to Seville should feel … a slightly euphoric state brought about by exposure to sun and architectural excellence –some of a Moorish character, all of it utterly transporting, especially the patterned glazed roof tiles.

What could spoil it, now we had moved away from the crowds?

The answer came with a stabbing sensation in the crotch area of my tweed trousers. A peacock was attempting to probe for dropped breadcrumbs.

Only on returning to the cottage did I learn the terrible truth of the Alcázar and that my instinct that something was very wrong had been spot-on – as, too late, I read an online description:

‘In the last few years, the Alcázar has received an unprecedented number of visitors. This is thanks in part to one of HBO’s biggest hits. The site appeared in a recent season of Game of Thrones and has attracted more visitors than ever as a result. For that reason, entry lines can involve standing out in the hot sun for an hour or more.’

On a brighter note, marmalade was an endangered product, almost worthy of inclusion in the Olden Life column.

But sales have gone up by 18 per cent since the death of Queen Elizabeth II, a fan, obviously, of the Seville version.

All thanks, apparently, to the Paddington Bear video – and nothing to do with Game of Thrones.